MATED TO THE COLD ALPHA

Chapter 10

Sera POV

The heavy thud of boots didn't hesitate outside my door.

It kept coming... Vibrating through the floorboards in a rapid rhythm before the corridor space swallowed noise whole. I froze, my palm placed to the freezing windowpane. The glass rattled slightly against my skin as the silent room rushed back in to suffocate the room.

Whatever had just happened had nothing to do with me.

That should have been a relief.

But It wasn't.

I moved away from the window and sat back down on the bed. The walls closed in... Squeezing the breath from my lungs. Nothing happened, but the air tasted heavy. Vibrating with the charge that drives forest animals deep into their dens before the first sound of thunder.

The scuff of boots echoed from outside the room before the lock clicked. I stood upright, my spine snapped up straight just as the heavy oak swung open. She hurried in, her gaze glued to the tray to avoid eye contact with me... The silver lunch tray rattled against the table, and she spun around for the exit in one fluid motion. Like a rabbit fleeing a predator's den.

"Mara," I called out, my voice low and steady.

She stopped. Her shoulders tightened visibly beneath her maid's gown.

"What happened downstairs?" I asked. A question. Waiting for her response.

Her head turned just slightly toward me... Not enough to make eye contact, but enough to show she had heard what I just said. Her fingers were gripping the empty tray carrier at her side with more pressure than an empty tray required.

"I don't know what you mean." She said quietly.

She knew exactly what I meant.

My eyes caught the sharp, white ridge of her clenched jaw... Her entire frame was locked. Her tight shoulders squared and chest hardly moving, like a woman holding a mouthful of broken glass she was desperately trying not to swallow.

"Okay," I said.

She left. The lock clicked behind her.

I turned to the tray. Soup with plenty of meat this time, dark and rich, steam rising from the surface in slow curls with a soda drink placed close to it. I picked up the spoon and turned it over in my fingers without using it.

My eyes moved back to the window. The yard below was empty now.

All eight wolves from the training session were gone. The space that had been full of controlled movement and purposeful training an hour ago sat completely vacant. Just the packed earth and the long shadows of late afternoon stretching across it. Spotted one guard standing at the far gate. Watching the road beyond.

Something must have pulled everyone inside.

I set the spoon down and stood up.

Crossed to the window and pressed close to the glass, angling my view as far left as possible toward the service entrance I had identified this morning. The door was shut. No movement near it. The gate at the far end was closed, and the guard standing beside it had his back to the yard, facing outward. Being vigilant on his assigned post.

My pulse ticked up. A heavy feeling.

Something outside the territory that had the pack pulling inward and positioning outward, facing guards at the gate.

I stepped back from the window.

If something was happening outside the territory, if the pack's attention was being pulled outward, then the internal patterns would shift. Guards repositioned at the gate. Other men were nowhere to be seen. The estate's usual rhythm was disrupted by whatever had caused that slammed door and those high-pitched voices forty minutes ago.

A disruption in their pattern was the closest opportunity I had found since I arrived.

My eyes moved to the door.

Locked, Obviously. It was always locked. But the guard rotation outside my door changed his shift at four, and based on my observation today, that was–.

I looked at the thin strip of light coming through the window.

Twenty minutes away. Maybe less.

My knees sank into the chair as I slid it closer to the table... I pressed my palms flat against the table, absorbing the low sound and vibration of the house beneath my skin while forcing my scattered thoughts into a razor-sharp blade before the panic could blur the edges.

Getting out of the room required leaving this door. This required the guard to be gone or distracted. The guard change created an open window, taking ninety seconds between the one leaving and the next one arriving. That I had been watching and timing for two whole days.

Desperately wanting to get out of this room.

Having to escape through the corridor. Then the stairs. Then the ground floor. Then the service entrance I had identified this morning. There had to be a way out through that door.

And then what?

I was on Ironveil territory. Without the roots, without my phone, without anything except the jacket on my back and two days' worth of mental mapping that only covered a fraction of a building I had seen so far.

And these wolves could track and attack me in a heartbeat.

I pressed harder into the desk surface.

William. Oh William.

Four days.

I had been gone for four days straight and had nothing to bring back to my pack.

Then a pull, that quiet heat that had no visibility and no off switch. I realised a half second later that the bond had intensified. Stronger than it had been at the window. Stronger than it had been since the chamber room.

My head came up.

An electric current seared through my ribs before my brain could process the shock. That invisible tug, that low, relentless feeling with no pinned source and no off-switch, flared hot against my bones. The mate bond was tightening its leash. My lungs seized as the heat spiked. It felt closer now than when I stood at the window, closer than the cold glass of the chamber room.

The footsteps stopped outside my door.

The lock clicked.

The Alpha crossed the room, and the door handle sounded with a soft, lethal click that hit harder than the sound I heard just forty minutes ago. His jaw locked into stone, the bone white and visible against his skin. A dark heat surged behind those golden-brown eyes, coiled tight and heavily caged, but carried a raw violence that hadn't been there when we last spoke.

He looked at me sitting at the desk with my palms flat against the table. The untouched soup was steaming quietly between us.

Then he set something on the desk beside the tray.

My phone.

I stared at it in awe. Then up at him again.

His expression remained neutral.

"There's been a discovery." his low voice carried weight throughout the entire room. A deceptively smooth surface hides the coiled, snapping muscle beneath it. "Concerning your brother.”

The soup stopped steaming somewhere at the edge of my vision.

Everything else stopped with it.